British humorist Oscar Wilde has said that he spoke “no foreign languages, and very little English.” It could be said that this also applies to the typical American high school student, as noted by the U.S. Department of Education in the 2002 Digest of American Education statistics “less than 1% of American high school students combined study Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Japanese, Korean, Russian or Urdu. (p.1 USDE)” In addition to that, the same study notes that only 44% of American high school students study a foreign language at all, with 69% studying Spanish, and 18% French. The study which is titled “Teaching Language for National Security and American Competitiveness” concludes that we need to do the following three things: 1. Increase the number of Americans mastering critical need languages and start at a younger age 2. Increase the number of advanced-level speakers of foreign languages, with an emphasis on critical need languages 3. Increase the number of teachers of critical need languages and resources for them The Department of Education is seeking to therefore increase funding (by $57 million dollars) and emphasis on what it terms “critical needs languages, such as Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (p.1, USDE).” There are proposals to increase funding in schools, hire additional language teachers and it is also proposed to increase funding for an “E-Learning Language Clearinghouse” to provide foreign language resources to teachers and students. One question which the Department of Education proposals raise is this: how effective are traditional and current e-learning methods of teaching language? And perhaps a more radical question: what would happen if instead of putting additional funding into traditional classroom language education, some of that money was spent developing and implementing language instruction in immersive environments? This raises further, related questions, such as, how effective are the current methods of language instruction in “critical languages?” One example of this would be instruction in Japanese. According to The Modern Language Association there has been a 94.9% increase in the study of Japanese by college students from 1986 until 1990 (p.155,Aida, 1994.) This would seem a source of optimism, if it were not also noted by other studies that there is roughly an 80% dropout rate in such courses of study (p.390, Mills, Samuels, Sherwood, 1987.) What accounts for the surprising rate of failure in teaching this language? One factor mentioned is that American students require roughly 720 hours to gain proficiency in an Indo-European language, such as French or Spanish, but the same students require between 2400 and 2700 hours of instruction to achieve the same level of competency in Japanese or Chinese (p.377,Samimy, Tabuse, 1992.) According to Rose and Billinghurst, in their paper “Zengo Sayu: An Immersive Educational Environment for Learning Japanese,” there are three main problems: “high levels of anxiety, psychological pressures, and limited opportunity to converse with native speakers.(p.2)” The result of the difficulty of the task of mastering the language, along with the stress and anxiety of attempting to do so in a traditional classroom environment contribute to the high rate of failure in critical language studies. Traditional teaching methods for instruction in foreign languages do little to address some of the difficulties mentioned above. Rose and Billinghurst discuss newer models of language instruction, including Asher’s Total Physical Response strategy and Terrell’s Natural Approach. Both of these newer forms of instruction have had some success in bringing in physical elements of instruction coupled with “silent periods” where the students pause to reflect on what they are learning and absorb the new information. The authors discuss three positive elements in these new didactic approaches including 1. Acquisition in incremental stages 2. Developing concrete associations 3. Using speech techniques to draw attention to critical, target language
They go on to summarize these elements as “physical demonstration, no translation into first language, silent periods where students absorb language, and coupling of physical activity with spoken commands.(.4)” They further conclude that these elements work best when they are presented in an environment where learning can take place free of anxiety and psychological pressure.
These conclusions concerning the teaching of language led Rose and Billinghurst to look to an immersive virtual reality environment as possible solution to the difficulty of teaching Non-Indo-European languages generally, and Japanese specifically. They developed the “Zengo Sayu virtual environment” as an experiment in teaching Japanese in an immersive environment. The setting of the teaching application is a tatami room in a Japanese house. In that room are block structures that can be manipulated using a “virtual query wand” to move them about. As the student learns about the environment, they interact with a digitized voice that gives commands and listens to responses. When they master all the basic vocabulary relating to moving the boxes, placing them in different configurations, and knowing how to describe what color they are, they can finally play a game giving verbal commands and using gestures to assemble a stack of blocks and “win” the game when the correct configuration is achieved.
Rose and Billinghurst have conducted tests with students and concluded that this environment has several positive features, namely “physically active role the students take,” “amount of motivation it provides”, “stress free environment”, and “total language immersion.” They do not claim that complete trials have yet proven the worth of this approach, but they do feel it is an option worth exploring in the teaching of language, and that further development and testing are necessary.
The “Zengo Sayu virtual environment” is one example of the possibility of “engaging otherwise disengaged learners” in the acquisition of what the Department of Education terms “critical need languages. (p.1 USDE)” It promotes the idea of “safe failure” in giving participants a place to practice their basic language skills without some of the stress and pressure of learning in a classroom.
Earlier in this paper the question was raised about whether it might be useful to invest more money in the attempt to teach language in an immersive environment. The work of Rose and Billinghurst, in their experimental environment of Zengo Sayu, points to the possibility that this might be a promising field that merits further experimentation and development. Others have looked at the virtual reality worlds (including Second Life) as a way of communicating complex information such as “critical languages.” One detailed analysis of this is the work of Johnson and Rickel in their 1999 paper “Animated Pedagogical Agents: Face-to-Face Interaction in Interactive Learning Environments.” They promote the advantages of “animated interface agents” that can use such aspects of interaction as “locomotion, gaze, and gestures” to interact with students. And that this can be an element in “turn-taking in a mixed-initiative dialogue.(p.1-3, Johnson &Rickel, 1999)” Through the use of such elements of non-verbal communication it might be possible to teach complex concepts in an interactive environment, with less stress and fear of failure than is present in the typical foreign language classroom.
This leads to an interesting possibility. It is a common accepted truism that the best sort of language instruction takes place when a student travels abroad and studies and lives “immersed” in the world of the language he or she wishes to study. What if a small portion of that world could be created in a virtual environment, so that language students could visit a “virtual Japan” (or China, Iran, etc.)? In that world the student would interact with other avatars that speak only Japanese (or the other host language) and play games or learn about objects and interact verbally with others to learn words and phrases. In another discussion of the potential for instruction like this in Second Life the author noted “a virtual world provides an experience set within a technological environment that gives the user a strong sense of being there (Warburton, 2009.)”
Further study, experimentation, and statistical analysis would be necessary to assess the efficacy of learning a language in a virtual world environment. In Steven Warburton’s paper, “Second life in higher education: Assessing the potential for and the barriers to deploying virtual worlds in learning and teaching,” he discusses many of the daunting technical challenges that would have to be resolved to make such a teaching program functional. He notes 8 specific problems with developing educational tools within Second Life, and by extension with other virtual reality environments. Two of the major problems are “time” and “economic” issues, with the latter being even more of an issue in Second Life which is not an “open source” format.
In conclusion, there are difficult challenges for moving language instruction into a virtual environment, but there might be significant rewards if those problems can be overcome and students of “critical need languages” could study in virtual worlds of their choosing.
Works Cited:
Aida, Y. (1994). Examination of Horwitz, Horwitz and Cope's construct of foreign language anxiety: The case of students of Japanese. Modern Language Journal 78(2),155-167. Johnson, W., Rickel, J.,: Animated Pegagogical Agents in an Immersive Environment, Journal of Artficial Intelligence in Education, 2000 (p.1-36).Mills, Samuels & Sherwood, 1987; cited in Samimy K.K., & Tabuse, M. (1992). Affective variables and a less commonly taught language: A study in beginning Japanese classes. Language Learning, 42 (3), 377-98, pp. 390. Samimy,K., Tabuse, M.: Affective Variables and a Less Commonly Taught Language: A Study in Beginning Japanese Class, Language Learning, Vo. 42, p377-398, 1992.H.Rose, &M. Billinghurst, Zengo Sayu: An Immersive Educational Engivronment for Learning Japanese, Human Interface Technology Laboratory, University of Washington, June 1996. S. Warburton, Affective Variables and a Less Commonly Taught Language: A Study in Beginning Japanese Classes†, British Journal of Educational Technology, Volume 40, Issue 3, pgs 414-426, May 2009. United States Department of EducationTeaching Language for National Security and American Competitiveness, 2006, retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/teachers/how/academic/foreign-language/teaching-language.html
British humorist Oscar Wilde has said that he spoke “no foreign languages, and very little English.” It could be said that this also applies to the typical American high school student, as noted by the U.S. Department of Education in the 2002 Digest of American Education statistics “less than 1% of American high school students combined study Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Japanese, Korean, Russian or Urdu. (p.1 USDE)”
In addition to that, the same study notes that only 44% of American high school students study a foreign language at all, with 69% studying Spanish, and 18% French. The study which is titled “Teaching Language for National Security and American Competitiveness” concludes that we need to do the following three things:
1. Increase the number of Americans mastering critical need languages and start at a younger age
2. Increase the number of advanced-level speakers of foreign languages, with an emphasis on critical need languages
3. Increase the number of teachers of critical need languages and resources for them
The Department of Education is seeking to therefore increase funding (by $57 million dollars) and emphasis on what it terms “critical needs languages, such as Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (p.1, USDE).” There are proposals to increase funding in schools, hire additional language teachers and it is also proposed to increase funding for an “E-Learning Language Clearinghouse” to provide foreign language resources to teachers and students.
One question which the Department of Education proposals raise is this: how effective are traditional and current e-learning methods of teaching language? And perhaps a more radical question: what would happen if instead of putting additional funding into traditional classroom language education, some of that money was spent developing and implementing language instruction in immersive environments?
This raises further, related questions, such as, how effective are the current methods of language instruction in “critical languages?” One example of this would be instruction in Japanese. According to The Modern Language Association there has been a 94.9% increase in the study of Japanese by college students from 1986 until 1990 (p.155,Aida, 1994.) This would seem a source of optimism, if it were not also noted by other studies that there is roughly an 80% dropout rate in such courses of study (p.390, Mills, Samuels, Sherwood, 1987.)
What accounts for the surprising rate of failure in teaching this language? One factor mentioned is that American students require roughly 720 hours to gain proficiency in an Indo-European language, such as French or Spanish, but the same students require between 2400 and 2700 hours of instruction to achieve the same level of competency in Japanese or Chinese (p.377,Samimy, Tabuse, 1992.) According to Rose and Billinghurst, in their paper “Zengo Sayu: An Immersive Educational Environment for Learning Japanese,” there are three main problems: “high levels of anxiety, psychological pressures, and limited opportunity to converse with native speakers.(p.2)” The result of the difficulty of the task of mastering the language, along with the stress and anxiety of attempting to do so in a traditional classroom environment contribute to the high rate of failure in critical language studies.
Traditional teaching methods for instruction in foreign languages do little to address some of the difficulties mentioned above. Rose and Billinghurst discuss newer models of language instruction, including Asher’s Total Physical Response strategy and Terrell’s Natural Approach. Both of these newer forms of instruction have had some success in bringing in physical elements of instruction coupled with “silent periods” where the students pause to reflect on what they are learning and absorb the new information. The authors discuss three positive elements in these new didactic approaches including
1. Acquisition in incremental stages
2. Developing concrete associations
3. Using speech techniques to draw attention to critical, target language
They go on to summarize these elements as “physical demonstration, no translation into first language, silent periods where students absorb language, and coupling of physical activity with spoken commands.(.4)” They further conclude that these elements work best when they are presented in an environment where learning can take place free of anxiety and psychological pressure.
These conclusions concerning the teaching of language led Rose and Billinghurst to look to an immersive virtual reality environment as possible solution to the difficulty of teaching Non-Indo-European languages generally, and Japanese specifically. They developed the “Zengo Sayu virtual environment” as an experiment in teaching Japanese in an immersive environment. The setting of the teaching application is a tatami room in a Japanese house. In that room are block structures that can be manipulated using a “virtual query wand” to move them about. As the student learns about the environment, they interact with a digitized voice that gives commands and listens to responses. When they master all the basic vocabulary relating to moving the boxes, placing them in different configurations, and knowing how to describe what color they are, they can finally play a game giving verbal commands and using gestures to assemble a stack of blocks and “win” the game when the correct configuration is achieved.
Rose and Billinghurst have conducted tests with students and concluded that this environment has several positive features, namely “physically active role the students take,” “amount of motivation it provides”, “stress free environment”, and “total language immersion.” They do not claim that complete trials have yet proven the worth of this approach, but they do feel it is an option worth exploring in the teaching of language, and that further development and testing are necessary.
The “Zengo Sayu virtual environment” is one example of the possibility of “engaging otherwise disengaged learners” in the acquisition of what the Department of Education terms “critical need languages. (p.1 USDE)” It promotes the idea of “safe failure” in giving participants a place to practice their basic language skills without some of the stress and pressure of learning in a classroom.
Earlier in this paper the question was raised about whether it might be useful to invest more money in the attempt to teach language in an immersive environment. The work of Rose and Billinghurst, in their experimental environment of Zengo Sayu, points to the possibility that this might be a promising field that merits further experimentation and development. Others have looked at the virtual reality worlds (including Second Life) as a way of communicating complex information such as “critical languages.” One detailed analysis of this is the work of Johnson and Rickel in their 1999 paper “Animated Pedagogical Agents: Face-to-Face Interaction in Interactive Learning Environments.” They promote the advantages of “animated interface agents” that can use such aspects of interaction as “locomotion, gaze, and gestures” to interact with students. And that this can be an element in “turn-taking in a mixed-initiative dialogue.(p.1-3, Johnson &Rickel, 1999)” Through the use of such elements of non-verbal communication it might be possible to teach complex concepts in an interactive environment, with less stress and fear of failure than is present in the typical foreign language classroom.
This leads to an interesting possibility. It is a common accepted truism that the best sort of language instruction takes place when a student travels abroad and studies and lives “immersed” in the world of the language he or she wishes to study. What if a small portion of that world could be created in a virtual environment, so that language students could visit a “virtual Japan” (or China, Iran, etc.)? In that world the student would interact with other avatars that speak only Japanese (or the other host language) and play games or learn about objects and interact verbally with others to learn words and phrases. In another discussion of the potential for instruction like this in Second Life the author noted “a virtual world provides an experience set within a technological environment that gives the user a strong sense of being there (Warburton, 2009.)”
Further study, experimentation, and statistical analysis would be necessary to assess the efficacy of learning a language in a virtual world environment. In Steven Warburton’s paper, “Second life in higher education: Assessing the potential for and the barriers to deploying virtual worlds in learning and teaching,” he discusses many of the daunting technical challenges that would have to be resolved to make such a teaching program functional. He notes 8 specific problems with developing educational tools within Second Life, and by extension with other virtual reality environments. Two of the major problems are “time” and “economic” issues, with the latter being even more of an issue in Second Life which is not an “open source” format.
In conclusion, there are difficult challenges for moving language instruction into a virtual environment, but there might be significant rewards if those problems can be overcome and students of “critical need languages” could study in virtual worlds of their choosing.
Works Cited:
Aida, Y. (1994). Examination of Horwitz, Horwitz and Cope's construct of foreign language anxiety: The case of students of Japanese. Modern Language Journal 78(2),155-167. Johnson, W., Rickel, J.,: Animated Pegagogical Agents in an Immersive Environment, Journal of Artficial Intelligence in Education, 2000 (p.1-36).Mills, Samuels & Sherwood, 1987; cited in Samimy K.K., & Tabuse, M. (1992). Affective variables and a less commonly taught language: A study in beginning Japanese classes. Language Learning, 42 (3), 377-98, pp. 390. Samimy,K., Tabuse, M.: Affective Variables and a Less Commonly Taught Language: A Study in Beginning Japanese Class, Language Learning, Vo. 42, p377-398, 1992.H.Rose, &M. Billinghurst, Zengo Sayu: An Immersive Educational Engivronment for Learning Japanese, Human Interface Technology Laboratory, University of Washington, June 1996.
S. Warburton, Affective Variables and a Less Commonly Taught Language: A Study in Beginning Japanese Classes†, British Journal of Educational Technology, Volume 40, Issue 3, pgs 414-426, May 2009.
United States Department of EducationTeaching Language for National Security and American Competitiveness, 2006, retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/teachers/how/academic/foreign-language/teaching-language.html